Playgroup | Helping brands build genuine brand equity

I made a conscience decision upon leaving university that I didn’t want to go into a job working at a software house. After studying computer science I wanted a break from working solely with techie people. Although it must be said that some of my jobs since leaving university have been eventful, after 20 odd months of working at Playgroup I can say with absolute certainty that I made the right decision.

At Playgroup the atmosphere and general ethos of people wanting to do well and helping each other out makes work much less of a chore. Knowing people on a personal level and feeling part of a team, rather than a number on the personnel register is a real incentive to do well. We’ve all met the designer who likes the sound of his own voice too much, or the developer that couldn’t deliver a web project in six months if his life depended on it, but in an agency environment you tend to find these people are soon found out, although sometimes not quickly enough!

I would never say never to working for a software house and not all of them are large multinationals that might suffer from some of the problems highlighted but for now I am happy and glad I joined Playgroup.

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Yesterday Mozilla launched the 3rd version of its popular web browser Firefox. To generate interest they announced Download Day 2008, hoping to set a new world record for number of software downloads in 24 hours. At the time of writing Mozilla have just announced that they achieved 8 million downloads in this time and Guinness are now reviewing this world record attempt.

This is great news and hopefully ensures the browser eats further into Internet Explorer’s market share. According to NetApplications, Internet Explorer has fallen from 84% market share to 73.75% since last May; in contrast Firefox has risen from 11% to 18.41%. To show that there is no bitterness Microsoft sent Mozilla a cake.

I am a Firefox user and must say that I am very happy with the improvements in version 3. These start with the visual style: version 2 on the Mac looked like a Windows application, just horrible in comparison to Safari. This has been addressed and the browser now looks like a native Mac application.

As well as the one-click bookmarking system, the one new feature I imagine most people will love (and I’m sure will become ubiquitous in all next generation browsers) is how you locate a previously visited website. We have all been to a website we like, only to forget it’s URL and then been unable to find it again. Other than searching for it via a search engine or trawling through our browser history it was difficult to locate. Now you don’t need to remember the domain of the URL, all you need is the name of the website, or part of the URL. For example, if you want to go back to http://www.bbc.co.uk/football, just type football into the address bar and the BBC site will be suggested for you.

There are a whole host of other nice features available including the ability to tag websites with Mozilla declaring there have been over 15,000 improvements in total. It has been a long time in coming (version 2 arrived in 2006) but it has been worth the wait. Download it now and give it a try.

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I was reading an article in PHP Architect the other day about how coding is not as fun as it used to be. The author was highlighting that there are so many considerations and security features that you have to be aware of, writing code for pure functionality is now only a small part of a web or application build. 

I have to agree with this, if I am faced with another large website build in the next few weeks I think I will have to go AWOL. I would guess that I only spend about 10% of my time actually writing functional code. The other 90% is spent adding security features, guarding against human input error and trying to get the site to render correctly cross browser. Usually Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox on Mac and PC and Safari are of concern. We can now throw Internet Explorer 8 into the mix as well.

I always code to ensure the site works in Firefox and then break it so that it works in Internet Explorer. To be fair Internet Explorer 7 is an improvement over the previous version but as Microsoft have made the upgrade from 6 to 7 optional the vast majority of people are still using IE6. If Microsoft do the same with the IE8 upgrade we will be left with 3 versions of Internet Explorer all being used by large numbers of people, all rendering HTML differently. It is a real pain as you cannot use CSS properties like “min-height” with any confidence as you know IE6 will ignore them. 

Getting rid of Internet Explorer 6 would solve a lot of headaches. I have always wanted to build a site that does a simple check to see what browser you are using and refuses to display if you are running Internet Explorer 6. I might do this when IE6 numbers start to dwindle. If you are using Internet Explorer 6 I beg you to update your browser, not only is it annoying for web developers, it isn’t secure!

Firefox (recommended)
Internet Explorer 7
Safari

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